Shouting in the Street: Adventures and Misadventures of a Fleet Street Survivor

By Donald Trelford

In this long-awaited book Donald Trelford recalls his adventures and misadventures during nearly sixty years in journalism. Described as the 'Rocky Marciano of newspaper politics', he fought off politicians, owners and predators over a quarter-century at The Observer, including Rupert Murdoch, who said afterwards: 'I made the mistake of underestimating Donald Trelford.
One owner sold The Observer because the editor refused to bow to pressure to support Margaret Thatcher. Another tried to sack him for writing the first report of atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe's forces in Zimbabwe. He tells for the first time the inside story of his complex relationship with Tiny Rowland – often tense, sometimes hilarious - and about his role in the notorious Pamella Bordes affair. He recalls how he was held at gunpoint by the FBI and strip-searched by the KGB. How a black dictator poked him in the chest and yelled: 'Keep out of my politics, white man.
While he was editor, The Observer won more press awards than any other newspaper. Trelford himself was described by Peter Preston, the former Guardian editor, as "a crusader… multi-talented, hands-on, a master of sport as well as news, shrewd and decisive." Written with style and humour, this is a compelling account of an important period in the history of the British press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Release date: Nov 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781785903533

Donald Trelford

Donald Trelford is a British journalist and academic, who was editor of The Observer newspaper from 1975 to 1993. In 1994, he was appointed professor of Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield, becoming a visiting professor in 2004 and emeritus professor in 2007. Trelford was a member of the Council of the Advertising Standards Authority until 2008, chairman of the London Press Club and a member of the Newspaper Panel of the Competition Commission from 2001 to 2007. He is a regular broadcaster and has published books on snooker and cricket and co-authored (with Daniel King) a book on the 1993 Times World Chess Championship in London between Nigel Short and Garry Kasparov.

Book preview

For Claire

‘He was fated, for many years, to be a defender as well as a crusader; a bruising role where he sometimes felt himself beset on all sides. But Trelford was first and foremost a journalist and an editor: multi-talented, hands-on, a master of sport as well as news, shrewd and decisive. The paper, through his years, may often have been under attack, but it also won many awards and gathered together brilliant teams of writers who kept the flame of Astor alive. And Trelford, at the end, was there to pass The Observer on, unbroken and unbowed.’

PETER PRESTON, EDITOR OF THE GUARDIAN 1975–95

‘Donald is a journalists’ editor. He appreciates good reporting and instantly recognises it when he sees it. And he has another great advantage over rival editors: he can write as well as his staff. He is an expert reporter with a sensitive ear for words and a nose for news that would do credit to a beagle. These gifts are priceless.

He also managed to lay out the front page and write many of the best headlines himself – something beyond most editors these days – while simultaneously taking bets from the staff on every big race or rugby international. The queue of people outside his office door after first edition, waiting to hand over fivers, was like Russian serfs paying tribute.’

GAVIN YOUNG, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT FOR THE OBSERVER FROM 1960

‘Donald Trelford is regarded by friend and foe as the Harry Houdini of journalism. Bound, gagged and tied to the rails and within seconds of the locomotive wheels, Trelford wriggles free from each succeeding crisis. There has scarcely been a dull month in all his years as editor.’

PETER MCKAY, DAILY MAIL COLUMNIST, WRITING IN TATLER

‘Trelford – the Rocky Marciano of newspaper politics.’

ALAN WATKINS, POLITICAL COMMENTATOR FOR THE OBSERVER 1976–93

‘Donald Trelford has a remarkable capacity for staying upright in a shipwreck.’

LORD GOODMAN

‘Donald feels that being editor of The Observer is an invitation to the cocktail party of life.’

TATLER

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword

Chapter 1: Tom

Chapter 2: Rick

Chapter 3: Kamuzu

Chapter 4: David

Chapter 5: Michael

Chapter 6: Arnold

Chapter 7: Lajos

Chapter 8: Rupert

Chapter 9: Kenneth

Chapter 10: Tiny

Chapter 11: Tootsie

Chapter 12: Edward

Chapter 13: Tony

Chapter 14: Pamella

Chapter 15: Farzad

Chapter 16: Muammar

Chapter 17: Len

Chapter 18: Stanley

Chapter 19: Garry

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index

Plates

Copyright

FOREWORD

Idecided to write this book on 29 April 2013, the day I was told I had prostate cancer. Being given such life-changing news naturally provokes dramatic, even melodramatic, thoughts. It was time, I thought, to get it all down before it was too late. I had been badgered for years by family, friends and former colleagues to turn my party-piece jumble of anecdotes into a coherent tale; one friend said I had reached my ‘anecdotage’. Somehow, though, I never got round to it. I used to joke that I was enjoying life too much, living with my new family in the Majorcan sunshine, and didn’t really fancy revisiting times when things were more troubled.

Many years ago, I received a substantial advance from a publisher for a book about my time as an editor, but I later paid it all back – something practically unheard of, I was told. I informed the publisher that I simply couldn’t be bothered to write the book and couldn’t imagine that anybody would be bothered to read it anyway. The second part may still be true, but I don’t care so much about that now.

I was also prompted to put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) by the birth of a son, Ben, when I was seventy-three – an age at which I had always expected to be dead, not changing nappies in the middle of the night. I realised with a chill, as I stared lovingly into his cot, that I would never know Ben as an adult. Then, three years later, Poppy turned up.

When she was two, Poppy made an unwelcome contribution to this book. Just as I had completed a chapter of about 20,000 words, mostly about Tiny Rowland, she came into my study to say goodnight. As she sat on my lap, she reached towards the keyboard and tapped a few strokes which, remarkably, ‘disappeared’ the whole chapter. Even computer experts failed to recover it, so I had to rewrite the chapter from memory. I sensed Tiny’s ghostly hand from beyond the grave.

I thought that, one day, Ben and Poppy might be curious to know what their old dad had been up to in all those years before they were born. The same is probably true of my four older children – Sally, Tim, Paul and Laura – who didn’t see much of me at home when I was working all hours as a journalist – and of my wife Claire, come to that, who only met me four years after I had stopped editing The Observer.

Even then, after making the decision to write the book, it took almost another three years to get down to it (during which time, thankfully, the cancer has gone away; so far anyway). I had always imagined that I would write in disciplined periods of intense work, like Jeffrey Archer, whom I see when he comes to Majorca to write his books. But Jeffrey doesn’t have to do the school run, or take and collect children from judo or riding lessons, and I imagine he has someone to do his shopping and have the car checked out at the garage. Having two little ones makes it impossible to arrange a regular writing schedule – I have just had to snatch the odd hour here and there when I could, or even the odd few minutes to rewrite a passage or add a story I had just remembered.

This book is not an autobiography. It wasn’t even meant to be about me, or at least not mainly so. But, after completing most of the book, I began to feel, rightly or wrongly, that readers might want to know who I was and what I had been doing in the twenty-eight years before I joined The Observer. So I introduced two chapters at the start about my family and some friends who’d had a strong influence on me at school and university. Really, however, this book is a portrait in action of some interesting people I got to know well, mainly through my three decades on The Observer or through my other, mostly sporting interests. Nearly all of them are more significant people than me. And I suppose something of my own personality may come through in the way I tell their stories and report on my dealings with them.

I started off thinking I would write about these major figures in my life in the style of a series of Observer profiles, but I found that I kept wandering off the central theme as one story reminded me of another. If the chronology seems rather jumbled at times, I’m sorry, but the memories of an old man can be a bit like that.

Readers of the chapter on Tiny Rowland, for example, may be surprised when Saul Bellow and the Queen turn up, or that the comic figure of Kenneth Williams intrudes into a chapter on David Astor. The chapter on Pamella Bordes was a late addition because I concluded that, if I were to omit that brief but heavily publicised episode in my life, some readers might wonder if I had something to hide.

I should admit that I was also impelled to write by some published accounts of my time at The Observer, especially about my relations with Lonrho and the paper’s handling of the Harrods affair. Some of these accounts were not only inaccurate but malicious, sometimes quite ridiculous. I have not responded before to even the most outrageous of them. I thought it was time now to put the record straight.

The title of the book came to me after an incident in London on one of my occasional visits. I usually stay at the Garrick Club, and when I leave I pull my hand luggage through the streets of Covent Garden towards Embankment station on the way to Victoria, the Gatwick Express and the return flight to Majorca, where we have had a finca on the side of a mountain since 2003.

This route takes me past Zimbabwe House on the Strand, which is looking almost as run-down these days as the country it represents. I have some history, as they say, with President Mugabe, as will become clear within this book. Every time I passed the building I would utter a profane imprecation against the old monster.

On one such occasion, however, I had failed to notice that a policeman was right behind me (Charing Cross police station is just across the road). After hearing my cry, the policeman stopped me and asked me what I was doing. I explained to this young black man about Zimbabwe and Mugabe without getting any feeling that he knew or cared what I was talking about. Finally, he said in a patient though slightly exasperated tone: ‘That’s all very well, sir, but we can’t have elderly gentlemen shouting in the street, now can we?’

CHAPTER 1

TOM

My father was born in the Aged Mineworkers’ Home at Shincliffe, County Durham. I always fancied writing that sentence: having written it, however, I can see that it doesn’t make much sense. How could a baby have been born in an Aged Mineworkers’ Home? The answer, it turns out, is that my heavily pregnant grandmother had been caught short on a visit to friends in a neighbouring mining village and had been forced to throw herself on the mercy of the nearest place offering nursing care.

Her husband, Samuel Trelford, had left school at the age of ten because his father had decided to emigrate to Pennsylvania in search of work in the coal mines over there. By the time the family had sailed across the Atlantic, however, my great-grandmother had discovered she was pregnant again, so they decided to sail back home for the birth. Had this not happened, they would have settled in the United States and I would never have existed. On such tiny chances can human life depend.

When they returned, my grandfather didn’t resume his interrupted schooling. Instead, he was sent down the mine at Tow Law (I still have his miner’s lamp in my study). He gave up mining when he was in his early twenties. Even so, he coughed his way through life with what was thought to be asthma but which turned out, at a post-mortem after his death at the age of eighty, to be the dreaded miners’ lung disease.

He opened a bicycle shop, of which I have an aged photo, in the pit village of Esh Winning. He taught himself to play the organ from an instruction book and became the local chapel organist. He was a voracious reader, always found ransacking the local library. I still have his marked copy of Julius Caesar dated 1906.

He studied languages, including Welsh (for no obvious reason, as far as I can tell, except that he liked the sound of it), which he would recite to me when I was a child. He would also take me on his knee and show me the effects of different sources of light on a Leonardo da Vinci painting. How he learned these things I don’t know.

Grandad Trelford was to become a substitute father to me during the Second World War – for the first eight years of my life, in fact – and continued to be a strong presence throughout my period of growing up, urging me to make the most of the education he had never had. Because of our close ties, I was given compassionate leave from the RAF to attend his funeral.

Samuel Trelford doubtless lived a life of unblemished probity, but one curious incident raised a question about this. An Observer reader, having seen me on television, sent a photograph of her late father, pointing out that he had a distinct resemblance to me. I was inclined to send a polite, ‘what a coincidence’ sort of reply, until I studied the photograph more closely and saw the address on the letter.

It was from Consett, the mining village next to where Sam Trelford had been brought up, and the family likeness was certainly uncanny. I sent the letter and photograph on to my father. When he didn’t respond after a couple of weeks I rang him about it. After a pause he said reluctantly: ‘All I can say is that my father had a bicycle.’

• • •

My father, Tom, was born in 1911; my youngest son Ben was born in 2011. By an odd coincidence, my mother was born in 1914 and my daughter Poppy was born in 2014. When my father was eight, he nearly perished in an epidemic of diphtheria at the end of the First World War (another example of the tiny chances on which human life depends). In his early teens, his education was interrupted by the General Strike, which closed all the schools. Instead, one of his teachers taught him to play golf – a pastime that became an obsession until he was over eighty – and he never went back to school.

His father, badly shaken by his own experience underground, would not allow him to become a miner, even if he had wanted to. So, when he was seventeen, he was directed to work in a Coventry car factory and went to live on his own in the Midlands city, 200 miles away from home. This was Norman Tebbit’s famous injunction to the unemployed – ‘get on your bike’ – put into action. He was given digs in King William Street, next to Coventry City’s football ground, and developed a loyalty to the club and a love of football that he passed on to his son.

I sometimes wonder if my obsession with sport derives from my father’s accidental placement next to a football ground in 1929. Being a lonely bachelor in a strange city, he had little else to do, except for playing billiards and snooker at the local Methodist boys’ club – another obsession he passed on to his son.

Tom found factory life not to his liking, however, and soon got a job as a van delivery driver instead. His parents came to live in Coventry and my grandfather started a business called Trelford’s Teas, selling a variety of exotic brands door-to-door from a van with the company’s name on the side. Tom had kept in touch with my mother, Doris Gilchrist, whose family came from the same Durham mining village of Esh Winning, and in 1935 they were married.

Unfortunately for them, his old jalopy of a car broke down after the wedding and they had to spend their honeymoon with my father’s religious and strictly teetotal parents. His mother, to adapt a phrase from P. G. Wodehouse, would never be mistaken for a ray of sunshine. The new bride later recalled how she had brought her a cup of tea in bed on the first morning and said: ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be coming down for a few days.’ My mother replied: ‘Why ever not?’ Her new mother-in-law explained: ‘Well, think of the shame.’

The Trelfords didn’t approve of the marriage, thinking my father had married beneath him. My mother came from a rough family of coal miners of mixed Irish and Scottish descent who liked a drink and, even worse, were not church- or chapel-goers. Her father had been a drover from the Scottish Borders before he went down the mines. Her mother’s family, the Ryans, were Irish, and had worked as servants in Dublin Castle. Because her own mother had died young, my grandmother had brought up her younger brothers and sisters and never went to school herself, so she couldn’t read or write.

• • •

Some years later, when my name became known, I had a letter from someone in Northern Ireland pointing out that the Trelford side of the family also had Irish connections. The Trelfords, in fact, are commemorated in a stained-glass window in the Anglican cathedral in Belfast, which I went to see. Until then I had known nothing of this branch of the family. I also discovered a Trelford Street in Belfast named after a prominent figure called Robert Trelford.

Evidently a couple of Trelford brothers had crossed to the north of Ireland with ‘King Billy’s Army’ – the army that King William of Orange sent to defeat the deposed James II at the end of the seventeenth century. They appear to have stayed on as landowners, one of them moving to the south, from where some of his descendants emigrated to Canada (there is a concentration of Trelfords in Ontario) and one to Texas in the United States. One brother had stayed in the Belfast area, presumably the ancestor of Robert Trelford. (In fact, nearly all the male Belfast Trelfords seem to have been called Robert, back to 1720.)

My eldest son, Tim, once opened the door at our house in Wimbledon to find a stranger on the doorstep. ‘My name’s Tim Trelford,’ said the stranger. ‘So’s mine,’ said my son. The visitor was from Texas and had tracked us down.

• • •

My Gilchrist grandparents went on to have twelve children, two of whom died in infancy. My grandmother told me that for ten years she never ventured beyond her garden gate. They had met when he had driven cattle down from the Borders to Durham and then gone with his colleagues to the seaside at Seaton Carew. When she was in her nineties, my grandmother reminisced to me about that sunny afternoon in 1901 with a faraway look in her eyes: ‘He and his friends dashed past us into the water. He was burned to a golden colour by the sun. He looked like a god.’

My mother was the first girl from their mining village to get a scholarship to Durham County High School for Girls – an honour that meant nothing to her illiterate parents. She used to get up at five o’clock in the morning to cadge the sixpenny bus fare to Durham from her brothers, who were putting on their hobnailed boots to go down the pits. Eventually she was made to give up school to go and help one of her sisters in domestic service near London. The sister couldn’t cook and my mother had to go and take over in the kitchen.

My Gilchrist grandfather was a bit of a rebel. He had once been jailed overnight during the General Strike after joining a gang that threw the Bishop of Durham into the River Wear for preaching a sermon in which he told the miners to go back to work. He had a reputation as a troublemaker and the only work he could get was as a shot-firer, a dangerous job that in those days involved going down with a canary and one of his sons into unexplored areas of a mine, some of them just two or three feet high, to see if they were safe enough from gas leaks to bring them into use.

When I arrived in 1937, my parents were renting two rooms, heated and lit through a gas meter, at the top of a terraced house in the Earlsdon district of Coventry; I was born in the back bedroom at a time when home births were more common. They moved to a newly built house of their own in Radford, with three bedrooms and a garden front and back, when I was a few months old, and stayed there until my father died sixty-four years later. I was nearly two when the war came. My father volunteered first for the Fire Service and then for the army and I never saw him until he was discharged in 1946, when I was eight. I had no memory of him before then.

Our house in Coventry was damaged by bombing – it was a few hundred yards from the Daimler and Dunlop factories, both prime targets for the Luftwaffe. During the raids, we hid in an Anderson shelter in the garden. Children were made to lie on top of each other on the floor, which was flooded with water, and we emerged after the raid soaked to the skin.

On the night of the big blitz on Coventry in November 1940, the house of my Gilchrist grandparents, who had also moved to the city, was struck by fragments of a bomb that had landed in a neighbour’s front garden. My grandfather had left the bomb shelter to go into the house and was thrown across the room by the blast. I remember my grandmother cutting a loaf of bread the next morning and finding a piece of glass inside it.

My grandfather never really recovered from the head injuries he suffered that night and died soon after the war. I remember him sitting silently in a rocking chair by the fire and teaching me to box. I would charge at him and he would send me crashing across the room with his huge miner’s hands. When I wasn’t at school, I used to take his billycan of tea to the village factory where he worked. His job was carrying heavy sacks – the only job he could get.

On the morning after the raid on Coventry, my Trelford grandfather put me onto the back seat of his Austin Seven – I still remember the registration number: OG7041 – and told me to stand up and look through the tiny rectangular back window while he drove round the devastated city. All he said was: ‘I want you to remember this.’ I was just over three years old by then and I believe this experience must have provided my first childhood memory.

I can still see the collapsed buildings, most dramatically the burning cathedral, with water running everywhere, fires still raging, the roadblocks and the piles of sand. There were large wrapped packages at the top of the rubble on each bombed house. It was only later that I realised these were dead bodies waiting to be collected.

My father was in Aldershot, preparing for embarkation overseas, when he heard about the bombing of Coventry. He asked for leave to go there, which was refused, but he went anyway. When he arrived, having walked and hitch-hiked all the way, he found all three family homes empty. We had all – my mother and me and both sets of grandparents – been evacuated back to Durham, where both sides of the family had their roots, and we stayed there for the rest of the war.

My mother took us to live in a village called Stillington, near Stockton-on-Tees, which was dominated by a huge slag heap on which we used to try to fly our homemade kites. She had to live on twenty-two shillings a week and rented a tiny terraced house with two small bedrooms and an unlit lavatory in the yard. The yard was so frighteningly dark in the evening that I would be in and out of the loo in seconds, a habit that has never left me. I have a vivid memory of visiting a young friend of my mother’s to see her new baby in a house that had oil lamps and water running down the walls.

Looking back, the war must have been a terrifying ordeal for my mother, still in her mid-twenties and bringing up two young children – my sister Margaret had been born after my father’s last embarkation leave and some years passed before he even knew of her existence. She was an unwanted child, which my mother took few pains to hide.

It was a difficult birth, which meant that my mother had to stay in hospital for three months while I was billeted with my Aunt Mary, who got married, with me as a page boy, while I was living with her. Although Margaret grew up with a loving husband and family, she had problems with depression in later life and is now in a care home with Alzheimer’s disease.

My mother wouldn’t have known if Great Britain would win the war or if her husband would ever return from it, or what would happen to her then. I will never forget an evening when I upset a pan of treacle that was being warmed on the open fire to make toffee and seeing my mother burst into tears. It wasn’t so much the loss of the toffee that caused her such misery, I suspect – though the treat must have cost money she could barely afford – but her generally bleak and lonely situation.

I was always top of the class at the village school, which caused me to be bullied by the Mercer twins, a couple of village thugs. One day my maternal grandmother came to collect me from school – she of Irish descent – and saw the Mercer boys hitting me as they tried to pinch my sixpence pocket money. When I saw her, I crossed the road and rushed for safety into the haven of her skirts. Instead of cuddling me, however, she turned me round and told me to go back and punch them, which I did, thrashing at them through my tears. The Mercer boys never bullied me again.

An older boy took me to see some Italian prisoners of war breaking stones in a valley. When people jeered down at them, the Italians responded by smiling and waving. My guide said he knew where they were billeted, so after they were marched off we followed them to a field where they lived in huts.

Security must have been minimal – I suppose the authorities thought the Italians would rather sit out the war in safety than try to make a hazardous escape – and we got close enough to peep through the curtains into one of the huts. When we were seized by strong arms and carried inside, we were naturally terrified. But the prisoners came up and hugged us and plied us with sweets and chocolate. We obviously reminded them of the families they had left behind in Italy.

My mother was not best pleased when I reported this escapade. ‘Fraternising with the enemy,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘You could have got yourselves hanged for that.’

Although we were living in an isolated village, we weren’t very far from military targets in Stockton-on-Tees, Middlesbrough, Newcastle-on-Tyne and Darlington, and at night we could hear the enemy bombers massing overhead and could stand at the front door of the house and see the bombs dropping at an angle on the factories and shipyards. They were all some miles away, but were lit up eerily by the searchlights. For a child, it was like watching a fireworks display.

For my mother, however, it brought back such terrible memories of the bombing of Coventry that she was paralysed with fear – a fear that communicated itself to my little sister and me. She would sometimes take refuge in the tiny cupboard under the stairs, shaking uncontrollably, and would drag us in beside her.

It took me some time to overcome the sense of anxiety my mother had instilled in me – if, in fact, it ever really left me. Recently I came across a line in John le Carré’s book about his life that had a special resonance for me: ‘I remember a constant tension in myself that even in great age has not relaxed.’

I was especially fearful of the noise of aircraft overhead, because I had seen for myself what destruction they could cause. Even after the war, if I could hear the buzz of a plane while I was lying in bed, I would wait nervously until the noise had passed. It would then take some time for me to feel safe enough to go to sleep, just in case it came back.

There were only two books in the house, both free offers from John Bull magazine. One of them, called How Much Do You Know?, I devoured eagerly and could probably recite most of the facts from it now, seventy years later. The other, How It Works and How It’s Done, was about scientific and technical matters. I never even opned it.

• • •

When the war ended, we returned to Coventry. At the junior school there I entered into a competition with other boys as to who had the tallest dad. All our fathers had been in the war, but none of us could remember them. I talked myself into being the winner. It was a source of some embarrassment, therefore, when my father was finally demobbed and turned out to be barely five feet tall.

My main achievement at Hill Farm junior school was playing Pau-Puk-Keewis in a performance of Longfellow’s Hiawatha. The reason I mention this is that I had to do the wild Beggar’s Dance, which Pau-Puk-Keewis performed at Hiawatha’s wedding – and some elements of this frantic style may still be traced in my dancing as an adult.

My uninhibited style of dancing – so out of character really – has been much commented on, notably by Private Eye. It caused an embarrassing episode when I attended a party given by British Airways, where my wife Claire was then working for their television arm. In the course of one dance I threw out a leg and my shoe shot across the dance floor and almost hit the chief executive.

• • •

My father was a salesman for a wholesale tobacconist (later he moved indoors and became a manager) and sometimes he allowed me to go round with him as he called on his customers. I remember a particular occasion when I saw him talking to George Mason, who had been a legendary pillar of the Coventry City defence and became a publican on his retirement.

George was a giant of a man who towered over my father by at least a foot and a half, yet Tom never looked in the least embarrassed by the disparity in size between himself and every adult he met, and plainly regarded himself as the equal of any man. Being of under-average height myself (though a good six inches taller than him), I think I may have learned that lesson myself through watching the self-confident way in which my father conducted himself.

‘Stop looking!’ was the recurring household cry of my childhood when my father finally found his keys. Nobody had moved a muscle to search for them: we would roll our eyes and get on with eating our cornflakes. It is a classic Freudian cliché that someone who has mislaid their keys doesn’t really want to go to work. No wonder really; as a non-smoker, it must have seemed strange to devote his career to selling cigarettes, and as a moral man it must have affected his view of himself when it became clear that smoking killed people.

• • •

Although I won a scholarship to Bablake School, this didn’t cover all the fees and extras, and my father struggled to afford the amount he was required to pay. When I was sixteen and poised to enter the sixth form, he arranged for me to visit Alfred Herbert & Co., a factory in Coventry that made machine tools. He was clearly hoping that I would leave school and become an apprentice, but the noise of the factory horrified me; in any case, I was determined to stay on at school and go to university.

We argued about it. My father was naturally concerned about the money it would cost him if I stayed on at school. And, of course, no one on either side of my family had ever been to university. My father finally gave in after talking about my prospects to one of my teachers. He was forced to take on a second job to pay for it. After working all day from nine till five, he would have a quick meal at home then go off to work as a clerk at Pickford’s, the removals firm, checking lorries in and out until ten at night. It was only later that I fully realised what a sacrifice he had made for me.

This prolonged absence from home, following six years away in the war, could hardly have helped his marriage, especially given that my parents were not temperamentally well suited to each other in the first place. He retained some of his parents’ Methodist mentality – high-minded, hard-working, teetotal. I can still recall the dread I used to feel when I heard them arguing. My mother, with her Irish–Scots background, liked a bit of fun. There was a period when she got a job as a waitress in a restaurant known as Fishy Moores, near the bus station, and I have never known her to be so happy.

My father hated her working, regarding it in an old-fashioned way as some slight on himself, suggesting that he couldn’t provide enough money to keep her. My mother loved the job – not only, I suspect, because it got her out of the house and allowed her to mix with people, but because she was earning her own money and not having to rely on her husband for pocket money, as women who stayed at home often had to do in those days.

Once, when I was earning a good salary, I decided that the best birthday present I could give her was cash. She was in her favourite armchair by the fire, where she would normally sit reading, knitting or doing a crossword. When I slipped her the wad of notes in a roll, it disappeared among her cushions like lightning before my father could see it.

They fell out badly over her love of bingo. She liked it mainly for the company it provided, but my father was shocked at her gambling and made his moral disapproval only too clear. But he couldn’t prevent her leaving the house while he was at work, so he had to lump it. It turned out that she was quite successful at bingo, and at the fruit machines in the same casino, and one day she came home with so many coins in her handbag that she couldn’t bear the weight and had to keep stopping and resting the bag on garden walls. This became a favourite family joke.

At the party to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary, she was heard to interject at one point, while someone was extolling their wonderful marriage, saying: ‘We’ve had our ups and downs, you know.’ How much distress lay behind that remark we could only guess at.

• • •

While he was living on his own in Coventry as a young man, my father had developed a love for the music hall, where he would go to entertain himself. After the war, he used to take me to the Hippodrome, where the number of the act in the programme would be shown in lights by the side of the stage. I was entranced; it was such a colourful change from dreary village life in war-time County Durham.

I remember seeing Ted and Barbara Andrews – ‘and little Julie’, the future Hollywood star appearing at the age of ten; the Irish tenor, Cavan O’Connor (‘I’m only a strolling vagabond…’); ‘Two Ton’ Tessie O’Shea with her little banjo; and a number of comedians, including Rob Wilton, Max Miller and Arthur English. Deep down, I sometimes think Tom would have liked to have shed the Methodist inhibitions instilled in him as a child and become a stand-up comedian.

His jokes could be pretty awful. I still remember the frozen look on the faces of some old ladies when he told them a slightly risqué tale. We knew a story was coming up when he uttered his favourite phrase: ‘Funnily enough…’ I thought of repeating some of his jokes here, but they might have made him sound (to use another favourite phrase of his) a bit barmy, which he certainly wasn’t.

When Roy Hudd produced a book about the history of the music hall, my father wrote to him about the various acts he had seen. Hudd wrote back saying: ‘You’re luckier than me. I only write about these people. You actually saw them.’ When he was in his eighties, he went to Birmingham for what was billed as an Edwardian music hall and attired himself accordingly. When it was pointed out to him that he was the only member of the audience who had dressed up for the occasion, he replied: ‘I can’t help it if other people don’t know how to behave.’

When my parents came down to London to see me one weekend, I persuaded my father to join me and some Observer colleagues, mostly from the sports department, at a snooker club near the office called Duffer’s. Casting aside any reservations about gambling he once had, he suggested playing for a small wager; my colleagues looked doubtful – he was quite old and barely high enough to see over the table. By the end of the evening, however, he had cleaned out their wallets.

Another time, both my parents came down to London to see Donald Sinden in a Westminster farce. It was a matinee and I arranged for them to meet the actor in his dressing-room after the performance. Whenever I bumped into Donald at the Garrick Club, where he was a prominent member, he would say: ‘We Donalds must stick together.’ He thought we should have a lunch of Donalds, but with Bradman and Wolfit long gone we couldn’t think of any other Donalds we wanted to dine with. (Funnily enough, Donald Trump’s name never came up.) These conversations would usually end with Sinden saying: ‘Ah well, we’d better have lunch together then.’

When I ushered my parents in to see the great man, he was in his usual effusive and deeply courteous mode, despite having just completed an energetic performance in which he had hurled himself around the stage at a time when, to put it mildly, he was some way past his first youth. He put his arm round my tiny mother and boomed down at her in his best stage baritone: ‘There’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask you, Mrs Trelford. Why did you call him Donald?’ To which my mother replied shyly: ‘I don’t rightly know.’

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Like many soldiers, my father always shied away from talking about the war, but he talked freely about some of the places where it had taken him, such as Cairo, Sicily, Milan, Rome and Trieste, and had photos of himself in some of them. When he was in his late eighties, I took him to the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall, where he became absorbed in a map of war-time Europe and started pointing out the route he had taken through North Africa and Italy. We were amused to hear an astonished young Scandinavian student say to his backpacking friends: ‘There’s a man here who fought in the war!’

He had never been abroad until the army took him there, which was probably the case with nearly all British servicemen in the Second World War. My parents only went abroad together once, when I arranged for them to go to Venice for their golden wedding anniversary. My mother hated flying (a first experience for her at the age of seventy-one) and my father distrusted the food, so I don’t think they had a very good time.

On one occasion, when I was leaving their house in Coventry after telling him I was about to pile my young family into an old Jag and drive them to the South of France, he waved goodbye at the garden gate – then, with a stricken look on his face, turned back and asked me to wind down the car window. I couldn’t imagine what he was going to say, but it was a remark I have treasured ever since: ‘You say you’re going to France – how will you manage for food?’

After my mother died, we asked him where he would like to go for his birthday. He chose Jersey, because he had never been there. He took a bus from Coventry to Victoria coach station in London, where my wife and I met him and took him on to Gatwick airport. We hit a serious problem at customs. After he had set off the alarm on his way through, he was ordered to empty his pockets and out fell a whole jumble of knives, pocket scissors and other assorted sharp objects.

When he was told he couldn’t take them on the plane, he got very cross, saying they were his property, he had owned them for over fifty years, and they had no right to take them from him. Tempers were frayed so badly that the head of security at Gatwick had to be summoned. She immediately berated my wife and myself for allowing him to bring all this stuff; but we hadn’t been there when he’d dressed and packed.

One of the customs officers, more amused by the episode than his more senior colleagues, said to me: ‘It’s amazing how a man so old and so tiny can create such a rumpus.’ Eventually a compromise was reached and my wife was allowed to go back air-side, as they call it, and send the items to his home in Coventry by parcel from the post office in the Gatwick terminal.

At the height of the row, the security people had taken a photo of the three of us. When my wife came back into departures and passed through various checkpoints before she could board the plane, she could see our photo coming up on all the computer terminals as her passport and boarding pass were checked. One official, looking at the